My guest this week is Jennifer Prendki. That name might sound familiar, as she was one of the great speakers from my Future of Data Summit back in May. At the time, Jennifer was senior data science manager and principal data scientist at Walmart Labs, but she’s since moved on to become head of data science at Atlassian. Back at the summit, Jennifer gave an awesome talk on what she calls Data Mixology, the slides for which you can find below.

My conversation with Jennifer begins with a recap of that talk. After that, we shift our focus to some of the practices she helped develop and implement at Walmart around the measurement and management of machine learning models in production, and more generally, building agile processes and teams for machine learning.

TWiML Online Meetup

The details are set for the next TWiML Online Meetup! Mark your calendars… the September meetup will be held on Tuesday, September 12th, from 3-4pm PST. The discussion will be lead by Nikola Kučerová, who will be presenting “Learning Long-Term Dependencies with Gradient Descent is Difficult”, by Yoshua Bengio & company. This is one of the classic papers on Recurrent Neural Networks, so you won’t want to miss it. For additional details or to join the meetup, head over to twimlai.com/meetup. If you missed the first meetup, the recording is available on that page as well.

Thanks to Our Sponsor

Thank you to our friends at Cloudera for sponsoring this episode. Yes, they are the Hadoop company, but did you know they also offer software for data science and deep learning? The idea is pretty simple: If you work for a large enterprise you probably already have Hadoop in place, and your Hadoop cluster is filled with lots of data that you want to use in building your models. But you still need to easily access that data, process it using the latest open source tools and harness bursts of compute power to train your models. This is where Cloudera’s Data Science Workbench comes in. With Data Science Workbench, Cloudera can help you get up and running with deep learning without massive new investments, by implementing an on-demand self-service deep learning platform on existing CDH clusters.

The folks at Cloudera are so confident that you’re going to like what you see, that for a limited time, they’re offering a drone to qualified participants, simply for meeting with their sales representative for a demonstration of Cloudera’s Data Science Workbench.

The Artificial Intelligence Conference

I’ll be in SF September 18-20 for the Artificial Intelligence Conference, and hope to see you there too! If you’ve already registered, send me a shout on twitter and let me know! If you are still interested in coming, but haven’t registered just yet, use code PCTWIML, it’s good for 20% off of most conference packages!